Cast Water Upon Thy Bread

Bread repair.  This has revolutionized the way I eat.  That sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't

I love good bread. Warm, bread with a crispy crust, with butter and Ementhaler or Gruyere on it.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you view it--unfortunate from the bread standpoint), I live alone.

That means that before I can finish a baguette, about two thirds of it is stale.  Or at least soft on the outside and slightly resistant on the inside.  In short, the opposite of how it should be.  Until recently, my only recourse was to turn such bread into crumbs.  That's fine, but if you eat a lot of bread, those crumbs accumulate pretty quickly.  Much faster than I have any use for, unless I were to start adding them to everything.  And what point could there be to that, I ask you.

It didn't help whether I wrapped it in the paper sleeve it comes in, or in plastic bags.  It just wasn't right.

At some point, probably when my mom was making bread and going through how to create a steam in the oven while it was baking, I had an idea.  I took a piece of dry French bread and wet it.  That is, I wet my hands and ran them over the outside of a piece of stale bread.  Then I put the bread in the toaster oven at 300 degrees for about five minutes.  The result:  warm, crisp on the outside, soft on the inside.

I have since taken very dry bread and actually stuck it under the tap and then into the oven.  It worked well.  A couple of weeks ago, I brought home a  loaf of artisan bread with rosemary in it  (from Fresh Market).  It was delicious.  Normally, I'd have cut it into serving sizes and put it into the freezer, removing a portion at a time.  I expected my visiting family to help me eat it, so I cut it up, put it in a gallon-sized zip-lock bag and put it in the fridge.  As it turned out, my family were all on a diet.  Just kidding.  But they found other things to eat, and the bread sat in its bag, so that when I turned my attention to it, it was pretty stiff.

I've been wetting the pieces, putting them in the oven for about five minutes, then splitting and toasting the bread.  Just had some with peanut butter and strawberry preserves.  Yum.  The bread tasted great. 

This also works really well for rolls.  I haven't tried it for standard sliced bread, but I don't seem to get a lot of that anyway.  But if you're toasting it, it would be worth a try.  Wet it and bake it a bit to soften and humidify the bread, then toast it.